Reforestation is a long game.
In April 2023, the project team from the International Centre for Environmental Management (ICEM) joined us, alongside the Forestry Administration and the Ministry of Environment, on a mission to restore five sites in the headwaters of the Sangker River Basin in Battambang Province.
The aim was simple in concept:
Collect data on how young saplings were faring to better understand which sites are thriving and which are struggling, why, and what to change before the next round goes in.
Local community members, forestry officers, rangers, and the Maddox Foundation field team surveyed the sites together, combining aerial drone imagery with on-the-ground observation to assess seedling growth, water supply, and soil erosion.
The findings were encouraging: survival rates ran from 71% to 94% across the community forest sites. Where access to water was limited or weeds had moved in, fewer seedlings made it — so the team mapped the area's hydrological patterns, designed water-storage tanks, and set a dry-season watering schedule to give the next round a better start. Sites that had lost plants were noted and folded into a revised planting plan.
But that survey wasn't a one-off.
The same partnership has since grown into the Mekong PAD III program (2025–2029), an Australian Government–funded initiative delivered through ICEM and focused on cross-border biodiversity, with five community forests selected as target areas and implementation beginning in 2026.
Takhes Meanchey is one of them — its nursery, lost to strong winds in mid-2025, was rebuilt by that November, ready in time for the new work to begin there.
The approach the 2023 survey shaped is still doing its job. Across our two ranger-station nurseries, more than 82,000 seedlings were germinated in 2025 and nearly 48,000 distributed for planting, with over 27,000 young trees surviving and ready for the next planting season — restoration measured not by how many trees go in the ground, but by how many are still standing the following year.
